"Rant" takes the form of an oral history of one Buster 'Rant' Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors and relations have their say on this (in Chuck Palahniuk's words) 'evil, gender-conflicted Forrest Gump character'. Buster Casey was a very small kid born into a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. Anyone who's ever kissed him would do well to seek treatment, for his recreational drug of choice is rabies and he gets bitten by black widow spiders for the priapic effect of their venom. The high school rebel who wins, Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton for the big city, where he becomes a leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing where, on designated nights, the participants recognise each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails and 'Just Married' toothpaste graffiti. (Or with 'forgotten' coffee mugs bolted to their car roofs or Christmas trees tied from bumper to bumper.) During specific windows of time, in limited areas of the city, Party Crashers look for the designated markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It's in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey meets three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies. But it's a plague that liberates his peers from being stuck in only one boring track through history...Expect hilarity, horror and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He's the post-millennial Jonathan Swift, the man to watch to learn what's - uh-oh - coming next.
Chuck Palahniuk is, of course, best known for
Fight Club, a remarkable novel which gave rise to an equally remarkable movie. As a writer, his specialty has been in having no speciality -- other than that of refusing to conform to any expectations readers might have of him. Except in one regard: a book by Palahniuk will be edgy, dark and iconoclastic. Which is very much the case with
Rant, The Oral History of Buster Casey. This is a novel that leaves the reader notably off-kilter for a number of reasons; its coal-black vision of a society in a state of near savagery and its sardonically funny approach to the scabrous narrative. The Oral History here relates to Buster Rant Casey -- and the picture we receive of him is conveyed through a motley group of enemies, friends, relations and sexual partners. Through their wildly differing accounts, we build up a picture of a very unusual man indeed: a charismatic, sinister figure with a predilection for one recreational drug (the main component of which is rabies, no less). His other substance-of-choice (in terms of highly dangerous stimulants) is the venom of a black widow spider (for its aphrodisiac qualities). Living in a small town which is barely civilised (and the passages relating to this bizarre locale are conveyed in Palahniuk s most phantasmagorical writing), Rant opts to strike out for the big town, and quickly establishes himself at the head honcho of an urban demolition derby which goes by the name of Party Crashing . The group, on selected nights, conducts a demented game of lethal dodgems, seeking out each other in cars to bring about satisfying motorway mayhem. And in the midst of this madness, Rant, a truly toxic figure, is spreading a variety of very nasty things among those he encounters.
This is nothing less than a vision of society plunged into insanity, with every comforting conventional aspect ruthlessly torn away. It's futuristic, it's very dark, and it's very funny. And (as the foregoing might suggest) it is most definitely not for those who like their literature sedate and unshocking. And in that way, of course, it's a typical Chuck Palahniuk novel. --Barry Forshaw
